Posts by Russell Brown
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The often-pilloried Josie Pagani has written a notably perceptive post on Thatcher and the Left for Pundit:
Neil Kinnock was my kind of Labour leader, a caring, decent and responsible visionary. But he lost because he led a party that always sounded conservative, as if the past Thatcher was sweeping away was better than any future we could articulate. Even as I stood with coal miners, holding ‘coal not dole’ placards, I wondered why we weren’t articulating something more constructive. In Sweden the left adopted the slogan ‘protect the worker not the job’, and succeeded where the UK left failed.
As she notes, the Left also in theory opposed some trends that were the justifiable aspirations of ordinary people -- particularly home ownership.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Katita,
Anyway someone listening to a radio announced “she’s gone”. Cheering broke out around the office. And bugger me, if we didn’t down tools and open some seriously dodgy lambrusco to celebrate.
It's amazing how many of these stories there are.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to 81stcolumn,
Excuse me if this seems to naïve or misses the point.
Not at all. I think I agreed with pretty much all of it.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
For the print workers, was it rational? A printer now (unless elevated to management) probably works longer for less money than their counterpart in the 1970s. Journalists maybe had a few golden years as papers expanded to fill 200 page Sunday supplements, but that’s all gone now.
What the print unions went to the wall for was a system in which journalists were expressly forbidden to touch keyboards connected to computers in their work. They could only use typewriters, and then have their copy retyped by members of the National Graphical Association, the only union whose members were permitted to use computers to enter and set type.
In general, though, newspaper type wasn't set with computers, but with Linotype, a technology invented in 1884, and printed with Letterpress presses, because the unions had resisted attempts to move to computer setting and offset printing. It was a dirty, inefficient process, end-to-end.
When I subbed at music publications in the mid-80s, I'd mark up copy on little sheets, which would be taken away by motorcycle courier, and come back as galleys, which I'd correct so they could be sent away again by motorcycle courier. I'd spend a couple of hours at a time waiting for something to happen. Once at Music Week I was warned not to make too many corrections to a galley because people wouldn't like it. I was flabbergasted.
Could it have been done differently? As I noted in the original post , it was in New Zealand, where neither management or the unions were so confrontational (by comparison both sides spent six years arguing unreasonable positions before Wapping went down) and a relatively painless transition was achieved. It was great when we got a computer at Rip It Up -- it meant copy could be entered and edited more quickly, accurately and cheaply. (Although the first time we used it, we somehow lost everything right on deadline and I had to retype the entire magazine.)
More to the point, it happened in Britain. While the Battle of Wapping was in full cry, The Independent and Today smoothly launched with all the technology the established papers were forbidden to use. It was not a sustainable situation for those established papers.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
This was partly manifest in stagflation, but that was mostly due to the fact the employers were unable to attack employment or conditions due to union strength.
I do think that in some cases it was a matter of not even being able to effect rational change.
I mentioned the print unions in the original post. When I applied for a subbing job at NME, fresh off the boat in 1986, they were astonished that at Rip It Up, I'd been able to do the typesetting on a computer (at least to the extent of entering and marking up copy). That kind of thing simply was not able to happen in publishing at the time.
There was an alternative: a radical government could have transferred industries from state and private capitalism into cooperative hands while removing the institutions that maintain class division (public schools, elite universities and undertaxed wealth accumulation*). This would create a world where workers own and control their employers and generate that community of interest between enterprise and worker which is so lacking.
Would that have actually fixed any of the problems of the coal industry?
And while I'm playing devil's advocate, it does have to be noted that Thatcher was seen as an enemy of the old elites.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Lilith __,
And my doctor said he was getting an increasing number of phonecalls from WINZ questioning “just how sick/disabled is this person?”. The calls would come from the regional office from a person who’d would never met any of the clients whose quality-of-life they were deciding on.
Try going to one of their pet doctors for an assessment for your kid. Someone who's never seen your child before will spend 15 minutes asking cursory questions before declaring they're not disabled enough.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to BenWilson,
Also, when the assessment came, it’s one of the few times that I’ve really thanked providence for the gift of intelligence. It could so easily have been blown, by not knowing how to appeal to the assessor, how to put the case that an accident is likely to have occurred.
Same, bro. Same. I think a lot about families not in as strong a position to claim their rights as we were.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Angus Robertson,
What was the alternative to what Thatcher did?
I’ve been thinking about this. I don’t think many of even the strongest critics of her policies would vote to return to some key elements of the post-war consensus. (Much as no one in New Zealand actually wants to go back to spending billions of dollars subsidising farmers. We actually paid farmers more if they dumped more chemical fertiliser on their land, a policy we’re still paying for now.)
The fully-nationalised coal industry had been in decline since WW1 and was being subsidised to the level of (in 2012 money) £11.5 billion annually. It was (and oddly enough, Thatcher acknowledged the issue of climate change) also heading for an environmental trainwreck. Mining was dirty, dangerous work from a bygone era.
But it should have been possible to address these problems without simply abandoning all those communities – and, even given the militant intransigence of the NUM, basically going to war on them. The decision to leave the north to rot was an actual decision. An ideological one.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
If I recall correctly, my high-functioning autistic brother-in-law had to take a test showing an IQ below 90 to qualify for a teacher aide.
Seriously? That's insane.
The system completely failed our younger son, but his brother was fortunate enough to get ORRS funding (on written appeal from his highly-literate parents) shortly after the scheme began. That meant teacher-aides right through his school years -- whose time we were happy to share with kids who weren't so fortunate.
I'm shocked and dumbfounded by what Emma describes here.
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Hard News: Media3: Our comedy, in reply to Jackie Clark,
Flat3 is hilarious. Crying laughing hilarious.
So cool, huh? Jolisa was all “Help! Can’t stop watching!” last night.
Why isn’t this on the telly yet, again?
It’s interesting that Roseanne isn’t desperate to do that – maybe they’ll keep it as a webseries, given the international potential for it. She has a few other ideas in the bag, I think. Talented woman.